Following up on my post from last May, I'd like to share some of the continued UI improvements we made in the latest Cloud release which continues our march to a lighter, cleaner looking Jive.

Icons

In order to really help lighten the visual (and data) load of the application, one of the things we did over the past few months is to redesign the icons. Our previous icon set was created over four years ago and matched the style of the application at the time: gradients, shadows, bevels, and complexity.

To match our new, more modern visual style of the UI, we've followed that up with our icons.

By simplifying the icons, as well as moving many from our sprite sheets to an icon font, we cut the amount of data downloaded in half. And while minor, every little bit helps when it comes to overall speed and performance!

Activity Streams

In our Fall cloud release we redesigned the primary Activity stream page to emphasize the top and trending items from across the community. This is information we've had for years, but was previously only in the lower half of a narrow column on the right. This information was too useful and important to warrant being relegated to that location; we wanted to make it more prominent and engaging. Add to that, the current 'All' activity view in a community of any size was so busy that it was impossible to keep up with.

This meant a redesign. We wanted to really make these new stream entries shine. We reorganized the information, restyled the entries themselves (font sizes, padding and margins), really enlarged the images added to Status Updates, and now we're even including a thumbnail image from within other content (Documents, Blog Posts, etc).

For the new Top & Trending stream itself, we're showing a mixture of trending and recommended content, people and places. The visual style of the stream itself needed to be organized a little differently since it's not a purely time-based display (newest at the top). We wanted to make it more visually engaging and interesting for the user to aide in scanning and consumption, so it's arranged as a series of cards to give it a very modern style that can aide in exploration of these Top & Trending items from across the community.

And here's what these new entries look like on the 'Most Recent' tab, or on all other Activity streams (custom streams, streams in places or on profiles). The entries get all the same attention they get in their 'card' displays for Top & Trending. Bigger images, clearer differentiation between entries, and a cleaner overall visual style.

And all this work carried through to our our responsive view, so when viewing a community's stream on your mobile phone's browser the visual style and images come through.

We're excited to get these enhancements out to all of our Cloud customers in a few short weeks. Thanks for reading, and look out for another post in the coming weeks from Curtis Gross about the new Top & Trending stream view from a product direction and road map perspective.